‘These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Judas Thomas the Twin recorded’
Prologue, Gospel of Thomas,
c. 1st to 2nd century AD
The cliffs around the village of Daba, in Egypt, are a strange and otherworldly place. Here, just a little north of Luxor, the Nile sweeps in a slow curve below the plateau of the Western Desert, then flows on towards Cairo. Demons, or so the old stories say, lurk in the cliffs that loom above. Spirits haunt the plains below. Nonsense, of course. But nonetheless it is true that there are ghosts in this land.
These stones have swallowed up the dead of Upper Egypt for centuries. The cliffs are peppered with graves and dotted by tombs: some of them grand and showy affairs, cut four-square into the face of the rock; others little more than cracks in the stone into which corpses in their shrouds have been pushed.1 The names of most of the dead, if they were ever engraved on the stones in the first place, have been eroded by time and sand. Today, Ozymandias-like, all are monuments to forgetfulness rather than remembrance. And yet the people of the past feel close enough to touch, here – at times, quite literally. When tourists came here at the start of the twentieth century, they noticed little fragments of bone and scraps of cloth lying in the dust.2
Around two millennia ago, this bend in the Nile was an ancient necropolis, a city for the dead. But, from the start of the fourth century AD, these tombs and caves and cliffs also started to swallow up the living. For it was in these years that a holy young Christian named Pachomius – St Pachomius, as he was later known – first came here. Pachomius had already distinguished himself as a follower of Christ: pure in body and in mind, it had long been his habit to eat only bread and salt, and to shun such fripperies as fine clothes, fancy food and even olive oil. Pachomius preferred to season his bread instead with ashes and his own tears.
And then, one day, he came to this bend in the river to collect firewood. The area had a twofold appeal: not only did the land here contain wood, but it was also rich in thorn bushes, and it was Pachomius’ particular pleasure to gather wood without shoes on, and ‘if thorns happened to pierce his feet he endured them without removing them, remembering the nails that pierced our Lord on the cross.’3 As he was engaged in this holy work of collecting wood and making his feet bleed, Pachomius was surprised by a voice from heaven. ‘Pachomius, Pachomius,’ the angelic voice said, ‘dwell in this place and build a monastery.’ The angel, with a certain bureaucratic briskness, then promptly handed over a tablet of iron to Pachomius, on which, the angel explained, were written down all the rules which Pachomius’ future followers would have to obey.
One of the first Christian monasteries had been born – and started to fill, rapidly. Year after year, more and more Christian men (and, later, women) gathered around Pachomius to devote their lives to work and prayer.4 Their life was one of regimented religious rigour. As the angel’s rather stark rules had ordered, each man would ‘each day pray twelve times, at evening twelve times, and in the night twelve times, and at the ninth hour, three times,’ a total of thirty-nine prayers a day.5 So little? the pious Pachomius had asked. It is necessary, the angel explained, to make allowances for the weak.
Those who joined Pachomius – and, perhaps surprisingly, many did – took on a life of striking austerity. Rest, conversation and individual liberty were all curtailed. At meals, the monks ate in silence; while they toiled – hoeing and chiselling and weaving baskets – they chanted Bible verses, lest their minds wander; when they slept, they slept on upright chairs made of brick, lest they become too comfortable. All were athletes of austerity, torturing themselves in this life so they might taste glory in the next.6 And yet, despite their divine intentions, it is clear that, at times, an all too human discord threatened the peace. The first draft of Pachomius’ monastic laws, handed over by that angel, paints an idealistic picture of the monks’ lives. Pachomius’ men would, the angelic document explained, perform their duties openly, and with ‘shining countenance’.7 It is a beautiful image.
However, it seems that over the years the countenances of the good monks occasionally clouded a little. For, appended onto angelically idealistic Rules of Pachomius: Part I are the slightly less serene Rules of Pachomius: Part II, and the even crabbier Rules of Pachomius: Part III. These testy codicils testify less to heavenly harmony than to the very earthly irritation that comes from living too close to one’s companions for too long, with nothing but basket-weaving for distraction. Crossness codified, they give vent to years of accumulated irritation, as action after action is outlawed and increasingly furious punishments are instituted.
So, while Rules of Pachomius: Part I merely states that talking at dinner is not allowed, Part II confirms this – but adds that looking around at dinner is also not allowed; that putting one’s hands on the table before one’s elders is not allowed; that missing prayers at table is not allowed; and that, if any monk should laugh at table, ‘he shall be judged.’8 Like an oppressive partner, the laws go on, codifying in minute detail what is acceptable and what is unacceptable at all times of the day and night. Every aspect of life is circumscribed. Washing oneself is not allowed, nor is anointing oneself, nor talking in the dark, nor taking someone else’s hand, nor – as one cross, but frankly not unreasonable, law added – ‘any part of his body’.9
Laundry, as so often with communal living, irked everyone. Another irascible law notes that, if anyone leaves their garment hanging up so that ‘the sun rises over it three times, the owner of the garment shall be judged on account of it, and he shall prostrate himself in the church, and shall stand while the brethren eat.’10 Other things were also frowned upon. Accumulating your own possessions ‘even to a needle’ was considered a loathsome crime, punished by ‘fifty days threefold with fasting with water and bread’, while the forced prostration of the guilty monk before the altar was to be ‘increased to two hundred times.’11 In other places, the laws show evident irritation with behaviour that, after years of desert isolation, seems to have wandered a little from social norms. ‘No one’, one law rules, ‘shall cut the hair of anyone unless he has been commanded’.12 No one, added another intriguing yet unarguable law, ‘shall ride on an ass alone, or without garments, with another.’13
Yet, despite all the rules and the privations, soon over a thousand men had gathered here, following Pachomius’ rules, tilling the land – and brewing quiet resentments against their holy brethren.14 Though not all Christians round about obeyed the holy Pachomius. Not long after the monastery was founded, someone – perhaps, some think, someone from the monastery, though that is far from certain – arrived at this area of the Nile carrying some manuscripts, probably contained within a sealed pottery jar. And then they hid them.15 Time and forgetfulness and the sands of the Egyptian desert closed over them. This is a good place to hide a secret.
And here this secret lay until, in 1945, it was rediscovered. The story of precisely how these particular manuscripts came to light is vexed, to say the least. According to the most well-known telling, they were found by a group of local farmers who were digging nearby. As these men were working, they came across a jar, made of red pottery, covered at the top with a bowl which had probably been sealed on with bitumen. The leader of this group of men was – so this story goes – unsure what to do with his find. His initial reaction was one of fear. Thinking that the jar might contain an evil spirit, a jinn, within its stoppered darkness, he hesitated to open it. Then another thought occurred: it might contain treasure. He therefore took his mattock and smashed it. At that moment he saw a strange material, ‘like grains of sand perhaps capable of turning into gold, swirling up and disappearing into the air.’ Or so it was said.16
Much of that story has since been vigorously questioned. However, while the details of where and how the find was made are contested, what the farmers found is much clearer: they found books, about twelve of them.17 The antiquity of these volumes was, at first, hard to judge. One of the books was so old and delicate it may have dissolved on opening, perhaps leading to those swirling motes of golden dust – probably papyrus fragments. Others looked so fresh, they might have been just a few years old. Wrapped in leather, and bound by thin leather straps, their covers were still supple to the touch. In photographs, they look exactly like the kind of bijou leather-bound notebooks one might buy in the more expensive tourist shops.18
Eventually, these manuscripts found their way into the antiquities trade. News about them started to spread among antiquarians – first slowly, and then with increasing excitement. In 1955, word of this discovery reached a professor of religious history in the Netherlands. He flew to Cairo, went to a museum that had photographs of the text, borrowed these pictures, then went back to his hotel.19 Peering at the first words, the professor read: ‘These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Judas Thomas the Twin recorded.’20 The Nag Hammadi scriptures had been found. The world’s understanding of early Christianity was about to be transformed.